Alicia Keys Lights Up Empire State Building with LED Lighting and HIPPOTIZER Media Servers

Alicia Keys flips the switch for the Empire State Building’s new LED lighting.

New York, NY, USA — Grammy Award-winning artist Alicia Keys helped launch the Empire State Building’s (ESB’s) new LED lighting system on 26 November 2012. The landmark building’s first-ever video LED light show, designed by world renowned designer Marc Brickman, is driven by HIPPOTIZER media servers controlled by GrandMA2.

Outputting KiNet to the ESB’s recently installed LED lighting network, six Hippo HDs drive 11,500 pixel-mapped DMX channels to four types of Color Kinetics RGB fixtures located on the building’s top four tiers. Brickman’s design was executed by Programmer Tony Fransen, assisted by Hippo Technician Darien Koop. The show, visible throughout the city and surrounding areas, ran in conjunction with a rooftop performance by Alicia Keys, on a neighboring building as she introduced her new “Girl on Fire “ album.

The pixel-mapping for this show represents a unique development: In a typical pixel-map, fixtures are visible and are viewed and mapped in their real-world locations. In this ESB show, the fixtures are not visible, instead they are viewed and mapped where they throw onto the building, turning the individual illuminated areas of the building into multiple video pixels, and expanding each pixel to HUGE proportions. This effect is consistent across all sides of the building. The show’s pixel-maps were all created by first making one master map in Hippo’s PixelMapper component, which was then split into four separate maps, one for each side of the building.